“We can embrace the moment [that happened] even if it didn’t turn out to be what you thought,” NickiMarie.  How many of us look back at our lives/a certain moment/a scenario with regret or, at the very least, the thought we wish we could do it differently?  How many moments do we have where, after some time has passed, we can still appreciate the moment for what it was even if it turned into something else in the end?  Nicki shared the above quote in reference to a particular concert she was about to go to.  The concert was a symbol, a reminder of her ex-husband because the singer she was going to see is what essentially brought them together.  She had to reconcile something she loved (the music) with the fact that while it started something beautiful and wonderful, it was over.  She then had to come to the conclusion and acceptance that even though it was over, it didn’t make it less beautiful than it was at the time.  The experience still happened and gave her clarity, and no matter how bad it got, it still gave her the good that came along with it.

When I look back there are so many things that I wish I could change.  I spent a lifetime dealing with the regret of not doing things differently.  While they always say hindsight is 20/20, that gave me no comfort. I didn’t know how to deal with the pain of not being able to change what happened, especially the things that happened as a result of someone else’s actions—or the things they did to me that I couldn’t undo.  I never understood how people could be so callous with someone else’s emotions.  But as more time has passed and I’ve begun working on the things that bothered me, the things that I could control, I came to a similar conclusion as Nicki: just because one bad thing happened, it doesn’t mean that it’s all bad.  We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak (I’m probably dating myself with that expression).

We can learn to appreciate what happened even if there were some bad parts.  There is usually still some good that comes with the bad—a lesson, some shining spot.  The point is to start looking at those shining spots and creating enough light around the rest that the dark doesn’t even matter.  We can’t allow ourselves to be bitter over the ending of it—and I know that’s hard because there is always a part (at least for me) that feels like it “should” have gone a certain way.  Like why didn’t it go as planned?  The truth is we never know all the reasons things turn out as they do.  Sometimes we simply have to embrace that they did.  It doesn’t take away or negate the joy (or whatever else) we felt during the experience.  The experience was still real.  Don’t look at the end as an indicator that something went wrong—look at it as an indicator that it has served its purpose and we are ready to move onto the next step.  We are allowed to mourn the loss, and we should mourn it.  But we are allowed to celebrate what was in spite of it turning into something else.  We control the narrative, we assign the meaning.  Make the story mean something that matters, make it all matter.